[sugar] Education?

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

  Hello,

> I think the quote is referencing something else (though I may misunderstand).

  Surely such an open statement can leave large room of interpretation.

> The eToys environment is a self-contained world of development. One
> that exists within the Sguar world of development. Programs, projects,
> source code and objects written in that eToys world do not exist
> outside in the Sugar world. You can write a sugar Activity or an eToys
> bundle, and, as we have seen in the gaming realm, they can often
> accomplish the same end goal.

  Not everything here is not true.  Etoys can read and write files,
get command line arguments, handle Sugar events, and talk the D-Bus
protocol.  We conciously disabled the abiilty of invoking arbitrary
Unix commands and C library functions but it can do these things.  We
should be able to (I hope) make an .pr file wrapped property so that
it looks like an Sugar activity that just happens to be executed on
the Squeak VM.  We surely want to add the Sugar clipboard support to
Etoys.

> Now this may or may not be an issue to people(OLPC devs, students,
> teacers), they may or may not care, but it is an interesting 'world
> inside a world' for this transparent learning machine we are
> developing.

  I'd put an analogy; it is somewhat similar to the discussion around
Emacs and UNIX.  Emacs is its own world in the Unix world, doesn't
participate well in the text processing command line pipeline, nor
written in (entirely) C.  Nontheless, it can edit files, move around
files more efficiently than mv or cp commands (by using dired) and,
most notably, extend itself.

  I often edit /etc files with Emacs but while ago some friends said
to me: "you should better not do that.  You should be using vi because
you don't know what Emacs is going to do with these files!"  Also,
when I was copying files with tcsh's file name completion feature, and
he said, "root's shell should be /bin/sh and not use completion.  You
should be concentrated and type in the correct files names!  That was
his own strange thoughts; it is just matter of knowing what Emacs
does.

  (BTW, I do use vi often enough, too^^;)

  As Alan wrote, the goal is "Children First", so if there is
something better, Etoys should be replaced with it.  But, the decision
should be based (mostly) on the end-use experience, and not (so much)
on the technical side.

-- Yoshiki